We are creating God. How can we make sure we are making one we can live with?

Generic answer, relevant to esteemed 20th Century scholar Joseph Campbell.

After a studying myths from around the world Dr. Campbell wrote a series of books, specifically The Hero’s Journey. This book underlay seminal breakthroughs in the dramatic arts, for instance. It underlies the success of the Star Wars franchise, for one.

It is a deep resource on the oft-repeated memes of the cultural stories of gods and heroes. Consistent themes recur, drawn from human nature and natural human aspirations. So all of the gods that people thought up, from India to Inca and edda to Veda, all of them show repeating themes. They are all cut, in a way, from the same human fabric.

Dr. Campbell rejected Christianity because it was different. The Judaeo-Christian scriptures just didn’t have those common human elements. They were foreign to his studies, They just didn’t connect.

To me, that is a strong answer about whether or not humans create gods—we do—and whether or not we created Jahweh/Jehovah/Christ—we didn’t.

Why should we be an evolutionist when being a creationist has eternal benefits?

What a hilarious idea! I depend on the grace of Christ, my Savior. But I do not denigrate GOD’s manner of speaking to modern humanity. Look into the heavens to see His glory, and learn there that “Let there be light” happened 13.8 billion years ago, not 6,000.

Deal with that, while confessing that the entire New Testament is historical and fully accurate. Folks who insist that Genesis “came from GOD’s typewriter and is history” know about as much about GOD’s Word, in my quiet opinion, as a two-year-old clomping about in Daddy’s shoes. Maybe that’s harsh, but compare it to the “go to hell if you disagree with me on Genesis” tenor.

Why don’t we invent something that turns carbon dioxide into oxygen, like a mechanical tree? And would that help the environment?

Little-known fact: satellites measuring O2 in the air over “the lungs of the planet, the Brazilian rain forrest, note a rise all day; and then before the winds can blow it very far (thousands of miles of expanse but net winds traversing a a couple hundred miles in 12 hours) the rain forest consumes all its own CO2 by morning. The planet boasts 3 trillion (science notation: 3E12) trees.

At a steady rate they consume twice the CO2 humans put into the air; but they also die, thus releasing all of that carbon back as CO2. Short answer, there is NO simple solution like trees or algae etc, largely due to the above.

The math says that each year humans ncollectively emit 40 billion tons (scientific notation, 8E13 US pounds of CO2 due to all the coal, methane, and liquid carbon-based fuels we consume.

We jam 8E13 pounds of CO2 into the air each year, so pulling all of it back out would leave us at a steady state THAT ISN’T REALLY STEADY. Why isn’t it steady? Because the effect of each gigaton of C02 is cumulative. The planet continues to swelter under each annual new layer or blanket until the heat leaking back out into outer space (there is no place left for it to go inside the atmospheric envelope) finally catches up with that increment. It’s cumulative!

So let’s be simple and say we’ll harvest 8E13 pounds of CO2 per year; the climate is still going to get hotter year over year, for some while. Thus we need to harvest more than that, say twice–1.6E14 pounds of CO2 annually for multiple decades to put the genie back into the bottle.

Since around 1700 we’ve taken the climate’s steady state machine and thrown sand in the gears by nearly doubling the amount of CO2 in the air, and if we’re not quite there yet, we will be soon.

What does this mean? We need a way to permanently sequester carbon; so far no one has patented an ecomonically sound answer to that wee small riddle.

Second, doing that requires staggering amounts of energy. When C2 meets two O2 and make two CO2, they release a lot of energy, such as fire; see what I mean? Prying them back apart by brute force means finding all of that energy (atomic fusion) or doing something a little more clever like making calcium carbonate (CaCO3 – an O2 plus a couple of Ca’s plus two CO2’s would be the raw ingredients. Shellfish do this all the time, and corals likewise.

So, how much calcium carbonate would we need to remove two annual loads of CO2 from the atmosphere? Skip the math part:

((Numerically, one CO2 has a mass of 44 while CaCO3 has a mass of 100. So to clear 8.8E13 pounds of CO2 we need, in abstract units, 12 of C, 48 of O, 40 of Ca. CO2 = 12 + 32 = 44, and CaCO3 40 + 12 + 489 = 100.))

((Or in other words we need 40 of Ca to add to 44 of CO2 plus 16 of O (the air is loaded with that) to produce 100 CaCO3 per 44 of CO2. SO: 1.6E14 of CO2 will make 160/44 E14 of CaCO3, or 3 5/8 E14 pounds of calcium carbonate.))

((How big is that? Its density is 2.71 gm/cc; converting pounds into grams we get (1.34 * 453.6)E14 cubic centimeters of CaCO3, or roughly 6.1E(16–9) or in round numbers))

6E7 cubic meters of marble. For instance, 1000 meters by 1000 meters by 60 meters. Or in cubic kilometers, 60.

Anybody ready to re-face all the buildings in the world, annually, with man-made marble?

Why don’t scientists reconcile Genesis 1:1 with the Big Bang?

Because, for one thing, it’s Genesis 1:3, “And GOD said, ‘Let there be light.” The first two verses appear to predate the introduction of light.

Science, therefore, is powerless to comment further, since it took multiple hundreds of thousands of years before the universe cooled to the point that matter could precipitate out—so hot it was all energy. Matter had to wait for things to cool to a temperature less than a given value.

Genesis 1:1–5 tell us,

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
²And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
³And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
⁴And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
⁵And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Science cannot relate to any material object during the “hot” period. Even then it took the formation of stars to eventually produce matter more complex that hydrogen and helium. So as to “Why don’t?”—it’s more a matter of “oxymoron, contradiction in terms.”

Genesis is, to a Christian in the 20th-21st Centuries, a bronze-age origin story that served as a Deed of Title and a liturgy. Look at the structure of the first chapter, and see the sense of awe and formulaic repetition. It is exactly the way a liturgy would be formed.

What makes Genesis holy to GOD is its theology, its teaching. These are inspired by GOD. The rest is a bronze-age cosmology across which GOD’s teaching (HIS real word) drapes as a cloak. The actual Creation is vast, well beyond the mental landscape of bronze-age folk. We know that the universe is roughly 3.2 million times older than the presumtive six thousand years of Creation. The stars that fill our sky are but a postage stamp vs the OED with regard to the stars in our own galaxy; and this galaxy is itself but a postage stamp vs the OED with regard to the Universe.

GOD’s glory doesn’t shout at us, it deafens us. And that is how science relates us to Genesis; it lets us hear GOD’s voice in full stereo and see His glory in 3-D.

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Can you provide an example of a scientific field or topic being hijacked (for years) by certain viewpoint (later proven wrong), where such a clique slowed down progress by exercising their political/economical power?

Breakthroughs which require a major rethink qualify; plate tectonics was a very tough sell for twenty-five to thirty years, before enough people managed to follow the data.

The clue in this area is when politicians hand-select scientists; you can always find a few on the fringe whose PhD’s look as good as any other if you’re sitting outside the academy, and you can cherry-pick qualifying remarks from the real experts to mislead the unwary.

Climate science and evolution have enemies with enormous followings. The consensus in those is very clear: a) evolution is real, and b) so is the approaching catastrophe of climate change due to human injection of CO2 into the atmosphere.

You didn’t read it here first.

I and my friend were arguing. What causes obesity genes to activate?

Not an expert answer, but a well-read person sharing some things.

“EPI”genetics (epigenetics) appears to be a sort of wrapper or “notes to the user” that accompanies the genes in the cell nucleus. It can be programmed during gestation, for instance if the mother is on a calorie-reduced diet (tons of reasons, but the genes can’t read) the child’s calorie-accumulating genes are switched from normal to overdrive. This effect takes up to four successive generations to get back to normal.

And of course there are “appestat” genes, which are like a thermostat but for appetite. Some people just can’t get fat (but when you see them eat you understand why) – because they just don’t get very hungry, and eating past hunger is almost as hard as pushing the plate away when your hunger is still set to, what was the term? YES – overdrive.

Could any other species damage Earth as much as mankind has?

Look at the other end of the spectrum. Once upon a time oxygen was poisonous. Today we have bacteria left over from that ancient time which are called anaerobes (not-air-using) because air, containing 21 percent oxygen, kills them.

Photosynthesis arrived. It released oxygen into the water (all life was aquatic then) and as a result all free iron radicals oxidized and settled out to the ocean floor. Today we call those former ocean floors iron mines.

Once oxygen became freely available and filled the air, forms that dwell on land had a way to get the oxygen their complex metabolisms needed. In fact, it’s easy to see that all complex life, anything from a microscopic worm on up, owes its development to the use of oxygen as part of its metabolism.

Bless that disruptive early microbe!

Are genetic mutations unstoppable?

Since copying is very very slightly imperfect, just about every cell division is likely to produce an error. We go from one cell to x trillion, which is on the order of thirty-plus cell divisions; every single cell in your body has a statistical chance to be unique in some one-part-per-billion way, not *exactly* like any other cell.

Human DNA consists of about three billion “codons” – one of the letters C A G T. The other side of the double helix has a different codon, but they only occur in pairs. So consider that a three billion digit number in base 4. This equates to 675 million 8-bit characters, or about 900 million alpha characters (they take 6 bits each).

That’s a book of 150 million words (average word size in English is five letters, plus a space or punctuation.)

Now imagine a 150 million word book with one or two typos.

Look close – DNA copy errors are repairable in a healthy individual, but of course that’s not foolproof. And radioctivity, free radicals, cosmic rays, etc. cause additional errors.

Unstoppable? That’s certainly one way to put it. Genetic mutations are the norm, even though each one is like one typo in a thousand fairly long (150 thousand words) novels. A decent novel these days runs to 75 thousand words; one book from Game of Thrones runs more like 250 to 300 thousand.

Startling when you see it up close – on the one hand, THERE IS NO WAY TO “STOP” MUTATIONS, and on the other hand IT TAKES A LOT OF TYPOS TO MAKE A REAL DIFFERENCE.

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If you were God and intelligent design were a thing, how would you design your “ultimate species”? What evolutionary pressures would you impose on them to do so?

We’ve been through them, and here we are.

Five million years ago a common ancestor of both pan troglodytes (chimpanzee) and homo sapiens lived in wooded (one guesses) parts of Africa. An area where woods met open grasslands enticed species members living there to spend more time on the ground.

Whithin a couple of million years their skeletons featured “feet” and “hands” instead of “four hands.” The hips shifted shape to better accommodate upright, two-legged locomotion, a change correlating to having feet and longer legs.

About two million years ago, by now genus homo species erectus et al. endured the first of about ten drastic shifts in weather, climate, flora, fauna, etc. such that only the most adaptable survived. At the same time, cranial size grew; the connection is easy to grasp.

The last one was truly severe; only a handful of hominids, proto sapiens, got through it. Among them one female line, as seen from mitochondrial DNA, out-reproduced or out-survived all others. A later funnel about a third that long ago, namely seventy to seventy-five thousand years, was the funnel for the male lineage. One Y chromosomal line, hence some Adam who had it first and whose many male descendants inherited the identical, un-mutated copy, out-reproduced and out-survived all other male lines.

Man, I hate those funnels! (cartoon caption.)

What disturbs you most about the Genesis – evolution debate?

I apologize for the bad mood I let this issue drag me into.

On the one hand folks, reverently and faithfully, believe in Jesus as a personal savior, and one foundation for that belief is Scripture.

I’m there too!

However, they also kowtow to the literal sense of each word, with a fairly persuasive explanation: “I am unworthy to nitpick the Word of GOD.” And they have the prospect (as I do) of deciding, case by case, whether a given datapoint is history or background. The responsibility begs for great divisions, because a thousand minds with the same basic task will arrive at multiple thousands of coin-flips.

That is wretched and detracts from the holiness of Christ’s sacrifice and the enormous beauty of GOD’s creation and GOD’s loving nature.

But then we get to the “ON THE OTHER HAND” which is that folks who wind up reading the Creation account as both history and science do EXACTLY the same thing w/r/t science that they abhor doing with Scripture.

YES – they nitpick, pick and choose, and erect some of the daffiest sophistries and logical fallacies you will see this side of death. They do this, of course, because science is very, very good at displaying massive proofs that e.g. the universe is 13.78 billion years old, the sun about 5 billion, planet earth about 4.6 billion, single-celled life 3.6 billion, and differentiable species boiling up across the last .6 billion years.

Atheists also look into the heavens and are at peace with the number of stars we can observe being so large it would take twenty-three or twenty-four digits to write the number. That’s a lot, isn’t it? To a Christian, not only is that proof that GOD is lavish beyond our ability to comprehend, it’s also an invitation to look at some of the Hubble images and let our awe brush its fingertips across them.

What bothers me, in short, is that people who refuse to read Genesis with enough slack for GOD to have been speaking a liturgy / deed of title to a pre-linear thinking, pre-scientific Semitic tribe instead of a TED talk on “How I Created the Universe”- – – these same folks turn right around and empower themselves to nit-pick and trash-talk the deep, brilliant studies of tens of thousands of career scientists to prove that those same people are unanimously deluded—either that or they’re atheist conspirators anxious to disprove GOD.

It’s one thing to “be a fool for Christ,” but it’s another thing entirely to be a fool by zip-tying GOD’s word to a rigid misunderstanding.